


Catch Me I'm Falling

by Carbocat



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 04:16:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbocat/pseuds/Carbocat
Summary: Clint hadn’t read the Maximoff file. If he had known about their parents, about the building that collapsed on top of them than he might have thought twice about shooting the floor out from beneath the kid.





	Catch Me I'm Falling

Falling.

Falling, floors six to four.

They had been there – their parents – talking, laughing, lecturing because Pietro hated the fifth grade and hated fifth grade homework even more. There was thick soup and bread, and then it was gone. All of it was just gone, falling.

Running, hand and hand, a rough pull on his sister’s small hand, and then ducking, rolling, hiding under the bed. Waiting.

There was a bomb close enough to touch – a missile. _STARK._

The whole building shook with the explosion, the floor fell away, engulfing the table, their parents, but the hole was much more than that now, it was blood. Falling, floor six to four, under a bed, landing hard. The landing was jarring, the floor trembled and fell into heaps, scrapes and cuts, splintered wood and broken glass. Falling, floor six to floor four. It hurt.

The hole was not a hole, it was a collection of broken things: of bones, china, voices, and their mother’s dead blue eyes. Wanda don’t look. Don’t.

Falling and falling.

The building came down on top of them. It creaked, swayed, and then collapsed like a house of cards. Falling on them, on the missile that did not go off. Even after he’d lost sight of their mother in the debris, _STARK_ still shown through the rubble in clean white lettering. Falling.

The bed strained and creaked under the weight of the floors above but it held up in the end, just barely. Constricting and pressing against their backs, collapsing little by little, suffocating on dust and debris. Glass.

Under the fingernails, digging into elbows and knees, snagging on tattered, ruined, dusty clothes, and biting unforgivingly into the skin on their stomachs, glass. He still had scars there.

Starving. Thristy. Two days, digging, shifting. Waiting until the voices calling out for help stopped, died, until all hope died out. Waiting to die with every shift in the rubble. Waiting. The bomb never exploded. _STARK._ Glass.

It was all about the waiting.

Everything was about waiting. Everything moved slowly now, painful in its sluggishness. There was mundanity to waiting for everybody to catch up, in the actions that could be predicted and then countered. There was an insanity to it, that was driving him slowly mad, that left all the time in the world for hate and vengeance to fester inside. Everything was waiting.

Waiting to die. Waiting to starve. Waiting for the shaking to stop and the dust to clear. Waiting for the pain that came with needles and Hydra doctors. Waiting for the Avengers to self-destruct. Waiting for revenge. For the end of the world.

It was all just so, so, so very slow.

“No, no,” He told them, zipping around the room, pulling wires and cords. Speed up. _Go faster._ “Go on.”

He was tired of waiting for the others to catch up. Tired of waiting.

The bullet came up through the floor, “You were saying?”

It was a conscious effort to slow down his mind enough to comprehend what was going on around him. Seconds ticked into minutes, into hours, into an eternity in the space of his fast beating heart. The arguing, the bickering, the threat to his sister. The bullet.

It was moving at a snail’s pace, slower. He could have touched it, reached out and plucked it from the air. He could have redirected it, let it hit Stark, Banner and his threat. He’d already ran through every solution and direction that the Avengers would argue and eventually take, but a bullet had not been included in any of those solutions. At least, not at this part of them.

His brow furrowed and his fingers twitched, it didn’t make sense in the context of what was going on around him. Had he missed something? Falling.

The ground disappeared underneath of him in a shattered deafening crack of glass and then it felt away under his feet. He was falling – floors six to four, _no_ – the sensation of air rushing passed his ears, Wanda’s call out for him, and a hard landing. It came much too fast, much too slow. Glass.

Beneath him, cutting into his elbows, into his back, embedding and healing over. It’d be a bitch to get out, if he could get it out. That was how things went now. He healed too fast. Everything about him was too fast for this world. He was falling.

He gasped when he collided with the floor, a jarring realization.

Braced himself for the weight of the building to fall on top of him. It never came.

There was weight pressed against his thigh, restraining but not painful and despite knowing that it wasn’t, it felt as if the weight was pressed against his chest instead. He wasn’t falling, he told himself, he had landed. There was air, fresh and clean, not dusty and stale. There wasn’t a bomb, just the old man archer, “What, you didn’t see that coming?”

There were words and they were clear, in English but too slow. He had ignored them.

Things got fast, or slow, he couldn’t tell anymore. Everything was mundane when they didn’t travel at your speed. There was no debris in his lungs, no dust in the air. The building was intact, for the most part, and still standing straight. Why couldn’t he breathe?

“Kid?”

Clint was not a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ kind of guy, he never had been.

There was a practicality to the bow and how he worked with it, to how a circus worked, how a spy organization worked. There was a skill to keeping all the pieces in the air. It was organized chaos, practiced randomness. He was logical to a degree even when Natasha sometimes couldn’t see it.

As well, he was far too damn old. He had far too much to lose now to go off half-cocked these days. But sometimes, damn.

His training did nothing to prepare him for demigods, robots, and smartass Hydra experiments in Nike tennis shoes. Hell, he was not equipped for any of this. He was just a guy with a bow and arrow. His life didn’t make sense anymore.

But when life handed you the perfect opportunity to get the upper hand on a cock _child_ , too confident, proud, annoying, and powerful for the kind of world they lived in, to knock that speedster down a few pegs…how could he turn that down?

Would it escalate things, probably.

Were things going to escalate anyways, most definitely. Yes.

Clint wasn’t compulsive but he was opportunistic. He took the gun from his waist band and he shot.

There was no way that he would have guess that this would be the outcome.

He had expected snarky comments. He expected that the speedster might have gotten away or knocked him on his ass again, he expected catchphrases and smirks. He had expected the rumble that was progressing above them, but he had not expected this.

He had not expected the regret that twisted like a knife in his gut for pulling his gun in the first damn place but it wasn’t like he _shot_ the kid. No harm, no foul, right?

Tony could replace the floor.

He thought it’d be funny, honestly, that he’d use the kid’s stupid catchphrase and knock him on his ass but Pietro froze. He just froze.

The kid shook.

Constantly, Clint had noticed it the first time he got a good look at him. He shook constantly. Vibrating like he was buzzing on an atomic level. It was something that Clint had filed away as things that just _were_. Pietro Maximoff vibrated like the only thing holding his atoms together was sheer force of will and the thirst for revenge.

Clint had noticed it but he never actually acknowledged it until now because it had stopped. The kid _stopped_. He froze.

Clint hadn’t read the Maximoff file.

He deemed it too thin to hold anything of substantial importance, deemed it the last goddamn thing that he cared about when Natasha was out there playing the captive of genocidal Siri. Stark had said that there was nothing worth repeating in it but summarized it for Clint anyways – _he’s fast, she does voodoo magic, that’s it._

Stark failed to mention that a fucking building fell on them.

If Clint had known about their parents at the time, known what they had experienced and endured in the time before they aligned themselves with Hydra, about the building and the glass than he probably…hell, he probably still would have shot the floor out from under the bastard but he would have been more prepared for this particular outcome.

“Kid.”

Clint crouched down in front of the speedster, letting his gun drop to his side but not quite ready to put it away. He got one good look at the wide faraway gaze in his eyes – there was a certain kind of blankness, a spacy look of retreating into your own bad memories. Clint knew it well. He saw it in the faces of his teammates, in the face in his mirror. Fuck, fuck, fuckity, goddamn it, fuck.

“Awe, damn it.”

There was shaking, no vibrating, neither a sarcastic smirk nor a comment. Nothing but harsh breathing that sounded louder, faster, than the fight happening above them.

Clint nudged the kid and he flinched hard, throwing his arms up to cover his head. Gasping hard. Clint sighed, “fuck.”

“Sorry, kid,” He muttered, making his decision, and then running towards the stairs. It was calming down Maximoff or helping his teammates upstairs, Clint chose his teammate.

He wasn’t exactly surprised that the addition of Thor to this situation had escalated things in a worse and weirder way because well, Loki. New Mexico. _This_.

Thor brought a level of Norse weirdness with him that Clint was never prepared for and it never really worked in his favor.

They were calling it Vision. Apparently.

It wasn’t JARVIS and it wasn’t Ultron even if he was kind of both. He was purple, had a cape, and a nice voice. Okay.

There were weirder things out there in the universe somewhere. Probably. There was probably something weirder than this out there somewhere, Clint was sure of it… well, he hoped that there was because he was coming quickly to the end of what he was going to be able to handle.

He noticed that Pietro had made it to the party, sliding up and standing over with his sister. He looked no worse for wears if you ignored the few shards of glass in his jacket and the spots of blood at the elbow. He didn’t meet Clint’s eyes though he definitely noticed that they were on him. Instead, he stood guard a step or two in front of his sister, a barrier between her and – and whatever Vision was.

It was settled in the end.

Vision was friend, not foe. They were going to fight. They had three minutes.

Clint went through as much of his pre-battle routine without Natasha being there. He grabbed his jacket and his arrows, he hid his extra weapons and checked for any more messages from Nat. He called Laura.

Then he checked on the twins.

He had a minute and a half to get to the bottom of what the hell happened back there. He knocked one and pushed the door open. He found the twins sitting on a bench, a med kit sitting on the floor in front of them and Wanda with a pair of tweezers, pulling the glass shards from Pietro’s arm.

She sighed, barely acknowledging Clint’s presence, and scolded, “Do not be a baby.”

“Am not being a baby,” Pietro nearly whined at her. “You are hurting me. On purpose.”

Pietro stopped his whining and hissing at his sister to turned a sneer to Clint, “What do you want?”

Clint could handle hostility, he preferred it to what he’d seen on the floor below the lab, and shrugged. He tossed a couple energy bars onto the bench and asked, “What was all of that about?”

“Vision?”

“Not that,” Clint rolled his eyes. He met Wanda’s eyes, she looked relieved that someone else was acknowledging it. Pietro was far too fast, too quick to not make it to the fight. With that one look, Clint was filled with the realization that she had tried to get to the bottom of it and had ran into a wall she could not get over.

He nodded slowly at her and Wanda found something that she trusted in that because she put down the tweezer and slapped a Band-Aid over the sluggish blood before she grabbed an energy bar and walked from the room.

Clint didn’t move from the doorway, “Kid.”

“What do you want?” Pietro said with an eye roll so fast that Clint nearly missed it.

“I just want to know what all of that was about,” He replied, crossing his arms over his chest. “Are you alright?”

“Great,” Pietro replied, waving his hand at him. He started to pace across the room in large strides, though his pace is slow. “I did not see that coming, yeah.”

“No, you didn’t.” It was hard to keep the pride out of his voice and judging from the eyeroll he got in return, he didn’t do a very good job at it. “Not many can do that.”

“Nobody can.”

“I did.”

“And who are you,” He sneered, “old man?”

Clint laughed, shrugging his shoulders. Fair enough, he thought, he was not the one adoring every piece of merchandise from here to Sokovia. He told Pietro, “I have kids, you know.”

“I am not one of them.”

“And thank literal gods for that,” Clint muttered and then spoke up more clearly. “Two little ones, six and eight, and another on the way. Being a parent, you start to notice when a kid is trying to change the subject. It’s not going to work.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Answers,” He stated simply. “To my simple question. What was all of that about?”

“I-“ Pietro said, pausing like he was looking for the words and then shrugging. “Cause me off guard. Not prepared.”

“Looked like a flashback of some kind.”

“It was not.”

“I picked this up,” Clint said, holding up the file that he had under his arm. He went back and read it, about the building, and the glass, and the bomb that didn’t go off. “A building came down on top of you.”

Pietro shrugged but it was wooden movement, pacing much quicker now, “Could have been worse, yeah?”

“Thankfully, it wasn’t.”

Pietro smirked something like Clint was missing an inside job. He asked, “Was it not? My parents are dead and my sister and I have aligned ourselves first with Nazis and then with robots and then with the man that killed them. We ended the world.”

“You’re going to save it.”

He sneered but didn’t say anything, pacing faster. It was probably a moderate walk to him but to Clint, he was speeding from wall to wall. There was anger in the movements, a shaking that was somehow different from his vibration, “You are a foolish old man.”

“Maybe I’m just wise,” Clint said, getting another sneer. He prayed to himself in that moment that his children never become teenagers. “Is it PTSD?”

“No.”

“How do you know?” Clint asked, raising an eyebrow at the speedster. Pietro stopped for just long enough to show him how much he thought that thought was stupid. “A demigod brainwashed me and I’m responsible for the deaths of agents that I served with. They tell me that it’s not my fault, that that wasn’t me but I remember it. I dream about it.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Do you dream of falling?” Clint asked. “Or is claustrophobia? You were buried for a few days. It’s nothing to be ashamed-“

“I am not ashamed!” He exclaimed, glaring. “I am – nothing. I-I did not have my bearings, you got the upper hand. There is nothing else.”

“Your sister is worried about you.”

“Wanda worries,” He snapped, waving him off. “I- I am not afraid of falling.”

“Just when it’s out of your control,” Clint stated, his eyes were determined and on Pietro. The younger man paced uneasily. “That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t like to be out of control, you don’t like to fall because you can do nothing about it. It takes you back there because you were helpless.”

“You do not know me.”

“I know your type,” Clint replied. “I _am_ your type. We built walls, we smirking and we’re a bit reckless because the pain we control is better than not having any at all.”

Pietro did not say anything for a moment and then practically spat, “You are trying to get in my head. Make me nervous before the battle.”

“I’m trying to help you. It’s going to be war out there, hell out there, and you are not going to be in control out there,” Clint told him. “Hydra didn’t work you guys, you were not field agents and you have no training for this. I need you to be clear of mind during this. It isn’t a game.”

“I know that.”

“If I had decided to shoot your ass,” He stated. “I could have. You barely knew I was there. Ultron will not take mercy on you, he’ll kill you.”

“…Why are you saying this?”

“Because you love your sister,” Clint answered. “And she needs you so you cannot go out here and disassociate like that. Got that.”

He got a curt nod back.

He accepted it and then sighed, “When all of this is cleaned up, I know a guy, Sam, he’s pretty good with stuff like this.”

“We need to go,” Pietro told him, trying to get passed him but Clint stopped him with a hand on his arm. Pietro rolled his eyes, “After this, I will consider, yes?”

“That’s all I ask for, kid.”


End file.
